How we brought OKRs to life at our music-streaming startup
Last Thursday we tried something new and launched our first ever OKR Expo. The goal? To create more engagement, transparency, and buy-in, in a collaborative and fun way.
At IDAGIO, we’ve been using OKRs for the past year and a half — you know, this crazy framework made famous by Google? It is a simple tool to create alignment and engagement around measurable goals. If you haven’t had too much exposure, check out this helpful article by Rick Klau.
As hoped, the Expo turned out to be a very informative and fun event and I wanted to share the learnings, in case you or your organisation is interested in trying something similar.
The setup: We are currently at 80+ employees. We’re a matrix organisation, with 16 different teams and 6 cross-functional units.
16 Teams and 6 Units x 3 OKRs each = 66 KRs, quite a lot of content to go through. We wanted to create a convention-style setup, where all teams and units would present their current 90-day goals on a poster, a whiteboard or in any other creative way.
Learnings: If you have 22 very different presentations, from A3 poster to a fully made up whiteboard it can get hard to follow. For a more structured way to understand and internalize the OKRs, it would have been better to present via the same medium — in our case, a whiteboard.
Boards can then still be adapted in a creative way.
Space & Time: You need enough space — but not too much — for people to roam freely, go from stand to stand. Each stand needs to have enough space to keep a group of approx. 6–8 people informed.
For the OKR Expo, we’ve initially set this event up to be 2 hours in the afternoon. We quickly noticed, that one hour would have sufficed and a free-form is more productive than giving each Unit a 10-minute slot.
Learning: Keep it short and sweet, depending on company size. For IDAGIO, an hour would have been enough time to learn and understand the other Teams/Units OKRs and still enjoy a casual chat with your teammates.
When we introduced OKRs in the first quarter of 2018, it was still a bit messy in terms of process and goal setting. However, now I feel like we are at a stage where everyone understands, buys-in and believes in this process.
Pro Tip: Offer some snacks and drinks ;)
Here are some impressions:
Would you like to learn more about us? Visit IDAGIO.com if you are interested in becoming a part of this journey, or feel free to check out our open positions.
